Infrastructure planning and provisioning

Before getting started you need to carefully plan how you want to fit AURA into your infrastructure.

Deployment scenarios

Think about your infrastructure architecture and how AURA fits into your ecosystem.

The following network diagrams outline ideas on deployment scenarios.

Single Instance

This is the most simple scenario for setting things up, as all services reside on the same machine. The downsite is, that any hardware issues or the need for restarting the server has an immediate effect on the full array of services.

Advanced

Here we utilize at least two machines for services: One for all web-facing applications (AURA Web), the other related to scheduling and play-out (AURA Playout). This is the most verstatile approach between simplicity and maintainability, since your play-out will still be functional, while shutting down the web server for updates.

Implementing migration and integration

Rome wasn’t build in a day. And a radio software ecosystem isn’t migrated in one day either.

Make a plan with different stages. Decide which parts you want to migrate at a certain stage.

Possible stages are:

Migrate or continuously synchronize scheduling and show data with custom migration scripts
Integrate your website and other frontends with AURA
Test run the actual play-out thoroughly over an extended period of time
Make the switch to the new play-out system

The Developer Guide > API – Migration and Integration chapter helps as a starting point for developing your migration scripts or make your CMS/website interact with AURA.

Separate staging & production instances

To keep your radio infrastructure up-to-date, AURA is meant to provide frequent releases.

In order to keep this process free of glitches, it’s good to gain experience in maintaining AURA on a test environment.

But also after moving AURA to production, it is highly recommended to have a staging- or test-instance, where new releases are deployed before actually updating the production servers.